Governments urged to commit to polio eradication

The United Nations children's body UNICEF has joined a global call for governments to commit to eradicating polio by 2018.

The disease is on the verge of eradication with just 223 cases reported globally in 2012, compared to 350,000 in 1988.

But the fear is that if global health bodies lose the momentum in ridding the world of polio more children could suffer the disease.

UNICEF's Senior Communication for Development Specialist, Jeffrey Bates, has told Radio Australia's Pacific Beat there's only been nine reported cases so far for 2013.

"Although children are still being paralysed...fewer areas have the virus circulating where children can be paralysed," he said.

"Right now we're looking at well defined geographic areas in Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan where the virus is still circulating and has never been interrupted."

Mr Bates says while polio remains endemic in just those three countries, without a plan to eradicate it completely, the risk to others remains.

"If we don't succeed in stopping polio in these remaining sanctuaries...then ultimately it will make its way back."

"The reimportation is something that is very, very real...because polio is an explosive epidemic disease," he said.

"As we saw earlier last decade we had an importation that originated in Nigeria, worked its way through the Middle East and made it all the way to Indonesia; even here in Australia, there was a...young man from Pakistan who had the polio virus that affected him - and this was in 2007."

UNICEF has joined the Global Polio Eradication Initiative involving governments, Rotary International, the World Health Organization and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in drawing up an Endgame Plan for polio eradication.

The plan, to be presented to a Global Vaccine Summit in Abu Dhabi in late April, contains a comprehensive six-year strategy and budget encompassing all the elements needed to see transmission of polio stopped.

Mr Bates says the cost of the program could be around $5 billion globally, but the benefits outweigh that cost.

"If you look at the long-term benefits...of never having another polio case, that's a drop in the bucket," he said.

"The expense of having polio around...we're talking, over the course of a decade, of losing more than that in terms of pallative care or preventative immunisation campaigns alone."